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 Sim-Life wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
...because the fun is in the attempt, regardless of the result? I'm not sure I understand what he's asking. If a person doesn't care about winning they can't enjoy a game involving a play losing? Not being sarcastic or passive-aggressive here, I would be very interested to hear further elaboration on the perspective.

Perhaps I phrased it poorly-I've seen an attitude here from some that I'll try my best to explain, and that might help.

I've seen posts where people are derided for even so much as trying to win-labeled WAAC or TFG for wanting victory. Heck, the first post of this thread is like that. But, when you get right down to it, 40k is a game (by default, at least) with a winner and a loser. There's no shame in wanting to be the winner, and I'd be actually a bit upset if someone was sandbagging against me in a game, outside of a tutorial or something.

I'm not saying WAAC. I'm definitely not saying to cheat. I'm not saying you should ever be upset at a loss either-losing happens, and it's fine. But I don't see "I don't want to want to win" as a mark of honor. It's just kinda... Zuh? Why play a game with a winner and a loser then?

The objective is to win, the aim is to have fun.

That’s a good way to phrase it. Better than I’ve managed, obviously

 Daedalus81 wrote:


To me it feels like people would prefer that everything is just so milquetoast that decisions don't actually matter. Moved to a bad spot? No problem - nothing dies anyway!

There's issues with the game. Admech are ballbusters that need a 10% hit. DE need boats and lances hit. But outside of that you don't see this hyper efficiency unless someone rolls a tank in front of eradicators ( that almost no one takes ). Everything you do has some innate cost whether it be CP, a spell slot, or an ability and choices can have consequences.

the problem is, in 9th edition, there's almost NO SUCH THING AS A BAD SPOT VS A GOOD SPOT.

The game is played on a fething NAPKIN with terrain rules so permissive that sighting 1% of one single enemy model in a unit with 1% of your model's left toe allows you to fire all of your weapons at 100% accuracy with no penalties from range and you can then even kill all the models in the unit that you CANT see as well!

If you want a system that utterly permissive, and you want the game to last more than 2 turns, then...yeah, it needs to be really really difficult for me to kill 50% of my points value with my unit. It's just a question of how long you want the game to be able to go. Currently, the game is supposed to go 5 battle rounds, and if you're on the board, you're basically firing at full effectiveness, so, 20% damage output should be the norm. That's just the math. If you want a unit firing at full effectiveness to be more exciting, you HAVE TO MAKE IT HARDER TO DO THAT THAN IT IS RIGHT NOW.

You're saying my opponent's blood claws were "Out of position" because they were standing right in front of the squad of rubrics. let's change that, shall we? Let's place them exactly on the edge of my range - 24" away, and let's cluster them behind a building. but, oops! Looks like I can sight one, single, tip of a chainsword from one, single, blood claw.

BRAKKADAKKADAKKADAKKADAKKADAKKADAKKA, exactly the same firepower hits you as before, yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay you're all dead anyway, good thing there's no penalties for anything!

obscuring terrain now exists in official 40k, that's fantastic, great step in the right direction, it's too bad 9th edition massively increased firepower for everything across the board to compensate for the ability to maybe, every once in a blue moon, possibly hide one or two of your units from being shot at by 100% of your opponent's army 100% of the time.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I want positioning on the board to matter more, not less. The level of firepower is perfectly fine right now IF that's the level you're taking when you're completely caught out, out of position or making a suicidal charge into enemy lines - but it's absolutely bonkers for the kind of firepower you take if you're just barely exposed.

What I want (to stop you hyperbolizing about "ShOulD BuFfS nOt ExIsT???" is, brief list:

-I want to decouple Modifiers and Conditions.

Conditions: Changes to your stats originating from psychic powers, stratagems, datasheet abilities, auras, prayers, army bonuses, etc. Conditions are capped at +1/-1.

Modifiers: Changes to your stats originating from Cover, Armor Piercing, Obscuring, Range, Weapon Type, units with variable statlines, and battlefield rules. Modifiers are uncapped.

Retain the current "6s always succeed, 1s always fail" to reduce edge cases

-I want to introduce a simple long-range to hit penalty. Say, -1 if over 1/2 maximum range.

-I want the shooting sequence to immediately end (and if fast-rolling, all additional saves to not have to be taken) if models from the target are removed such that the attacker no longer has line of sight, range, or Engagement Range if in melee. Removes the old issue of "rhino sniping" because as the target player I can choose to save my, say, special weapon or squad leader if I wish by taking out models you can't see, but re-introduces the common sense 'cant see 'em, can't shoot 'em' setup that used to exist.

-I want Cover (+1sv) to be a universal rule on all terrain that applies EITHER if a model is wholly on or in a terrain piece, OR if a target model of a shooting attack is 50% or more obscured by terrain further than 1" from a firing model or models not in the firing or target unit. Dense and Obscuring still exist, but see below WRT Obscuring. Also, cover from >50% obscurement applies to all unit types.

-I want a player to be able to place a "Taking Cover"/"Conceal"/"Hiding" token next to a unit either during deployment or at the end of their movement phase (hiding tokens are also removed at the end of the movement phase). Units with a Hiding token may not shoot in the shooting phase and may not declare charges in the charge phase. Hiding models that are at all obscured by Obscuring terrain are fully out of LOS, models that are not Hiding treat Obscuring as Dense instead.

-I want morale to be reworked into a system that is more likely to occur with lower numbers of casualties (2d6 roll based worked great) and that rather than adding casualties, reduces or removes offensive output from a unit. the new 'Hiding" system would be a perfect lever to use here.

-I want the Command Ability system lifted directly from Age of Sigmar and, much like "Warscroll Battalions" the stratagem system aborted or greatly greatly cut down. Character auras become more powerful stratagems granted by that character and CP becomes a turn-by-turn resource you either use during the battle round or lose, with stratagems having a much greater focus on acting during your opponent's turn rather than creating super-wombo-combos on your turn.

-And for crying out loud I want my 1/3 of the frickin' board area back why we got a game with 48" ranges being super common played on a 44" wide table???

Your experience with positioning, terrain, and damage is totally different from mine. Positioning has mattered so much in every single game.

In one my opponent had two redemptors and two volcons. Hardly something I could take head on with a medium ranged army. So I hunkered down and held objectives and let him move to the middle. Then I hopped / breached / circled those ruins to put most of my whole army into his face the next turn allowing me to bring 3 dreadnoughts down.

If you have competent terrain it's really hard to draw line of sight to units unless you decide to expose them.





Automatically Appended Next Post:

 the_scotsman wrote:

-I want to decouple Modifiers and Conditions.

Conditions: Changes to your stats originating from psychic powers, stratagems, datasheet abilities, auras, prayers, army bonuses, etc. Conditions are capped at +1/-1.

Modifiers: Changes to your stats originating from Cover, Armor Piercing, Obscuring, Range, Weapon Type, units with variable statlines, and battlefield rules. Modifiers are uncapped.


Retain the current "6s always succeed, 1s always fail" to reduce edge cases

-I want to introduce a simple long-range to hit penalty. Say, -1 if over 1/2 maximum range.

-I want the shooting sequence to immediately end (and if fast-rolling, all additional saves to not have to be taken) if models from the target are removed such that the attacker no longer has line of sight, range, or Engagement Range if in melee. Removes the old issue of "rhino sniping" because as the target player I can choose to save my, say, special weapon or squad leader if I wish by taking out models you can't see, but re-introduces the common sense 'cant see 'em, can't shoot 'em' setup that used to exist.

-I want Cover (+1sv) to be a universal rule on all terrain that applies EITHER if a model is wholly on or in a terrain piece, OR if a target model of a shooting attack is 50% or more obscured by terrain further than 1" from a firing model or models not in the firing or target unit. Dense and Obscuring still exist, but see below WRT Obscuring. Also, cover from >50% obscurement applies to all unit types.

-I want a player to be able to place a "Taking Cover"/"Conceal"/"Hiding" token next to a unit either during deployment or at the end of their movement phase (hiding tokens are also removed at the end of the movement phase). Units with a Hiding token may not shoot in the shooting phase and may not declare charges in the charge phase. Hiding models that are at all obscured by Obscuring terrain are fully out of LOS, models that are not Hiding treat Obscuring as Dense instead.

-I want morale to be reworked into a system that is more likely to occur with lower numbers of casualties (2d6 roll based worked great) and that rather than adding casualties, reduces or removes offensive output from a unit. the new 'Hiding" system would be a perfect lever to use here.

-I want the Command Ability system lifted directly from Age of Sigmar and, much like "Warscroll Battalions" the stratagem system aborted or greatly greatly cut down. Character auras become more powerful stratagems granted by that character and CP becomes a turn-by-turn resource you either use during the battle round or lose, with stratagems having a much greater focus on acting during your opponent's turn rather than creating super-wombo-combos on your turn.

-And for crying out loud I want my 1/3 of the frickin' board area back why we got a game with 48" ranges being super common played on a 44" wide table???

I don't disagree with most of that, really. Especially the stuff in red. Maybe not the morale thing since I think it's pretty low casualties at present.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Voss wrote:
...Yeah, I'm not a fan of Chaos 3.5 and don't get the nostalgia for it...

It may not have been particularly well-balanced, but it had thoroughly done rules for all nine Legions that managed to make them play very differently from each other with far fewer models and rules than the current run of CSM books, and it was the last time that CSM weren't "loyalists, but worse".

"Not particularly well-balanced" is like describing an amputated head as minor cut.

It was the nadir of 40K. Period. Nothing in 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, etc.. comes close.

Sunny Side Up wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Voss wrote:
...Yeah, I'm not a fan of Chaos 3.5 and don't get the nostalgia for it...

It may not have been particularly well-balanced, but it had thoroughly done rules for all nine Legions that managed to make them play very differently from each other with far fewer models and rules than the current run of CSM books, and it was the last time that CSM weren't "loyalists, but worse".

"Not particularly well-balanced" is like describing an amputated head as minor cut.

It was the nadir of 40K. Period. Nothing in 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, etc.. comes close.

4th was worse, manipulation lash wings.
Hellturkey Spam at it's hight was worse excess.

Sure 3.5 has massive problems , but conceptually it actually worked for csm.
Something that can't be said for anything afterwards except maybee the DG and TS dex.

 JNAProductions wrote:
I would like to ask a question:

If you don't care about winning, why play a competitive game? In 40k, without houseruling it to be some kind of co-op, vs. AI experience; there's a winner and a loser. Winning isn't everything, of course, but you should be trying your best to succeed. (Excepting stuff like tutorial games or similar.)

There's plenty of co-op board games and such, or you could work on some sort of AI system for 40k to play together, but I don't see why you'd WANT to lose a game of 40k.

The point is 40k isn't a competitive game. GW games are meant to be fun garage games between family or friends. It can try to be and I think these days it's good enough to work decently even as a competitive game, but competitive games are based around some sort of balance in the rules which in GW games can't exist.

It's not about not wanting to win, it's about seeking the most balanced game possible. There's no fun when a game is one sided. So I may purposefully field non optimized list if my opponent is a noob or doesn't have the models to compete with my optimized collections. It doesn't mean that after deployment I make mistakes on purpose to avoid winning, after deployment I play at my very best. So in the end I never want to lose a game, but sometimes (very often actually) I don't even want to win. I just want a game that is as close as possible. When the game begins I play to win but I never set up my game in order to maximize my chances to win.

I mostly play against opponents I know, and we know in advance which factions are going to fight against, typically lists are undisclosed but we know each other collections of course and sometimes even play with fully pre-fixed lists, not pick up games against strangers, that's something that maybe should be clarified. I never considered good that kind of play, just a necessary evil when you don't have a community with people that share the same attitude towards the game.

Another example: if an army isn't in a good state but has one or more builds that are actually competitive and they're the opposite of what I'd like to play I simply avoid those builds. I don't want to lose, but playing something I don't like isn't fun and it's worse than losing.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
Your experience with positioning, terrain, and damage is totally different from mine. Positioning has mattered so much in every single game.

In one my opponent had two redemptors and two volcons. Hardly something I could take head on with a medium ranged army. So I hunkered down and held objectives and let him move to the middle. Then I hopped / breached / circled those ruins to put most of my whole army into his face the next turn allowing me to bring 3 dreadnoughts down.

If you have competent terrain it's really hard to draw line of sight to units unless you decide to expose them.

Spoiler:

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 the_scotsman wrote:

-I want to decouple Modifiers and Conditions.

Conditions: Changes to your stats originating from psychic powers, stratagems, datasheet abilities, auras, prayers, army bonuses, etc. Conditions are capped at +1/-1.

Modifiers: Changes to your stats originating from Cover, Armor Piercing, Obscuring, Range, Weapon Type, units with variable statlines, and battlefield rules. Modifiers are uncapped.


Retain the current "6s always succeed, 1s always fail" to reduce edge cases

-I want to introduce a simple long-range to hit penalty. Say, -1 if over 1/2 maximum range.

-I want the shooting sequence to immediately end (and if fast-rolling, all additional saves to not have to be taken) if models from the target are removed such that the attacker no longer has line of sight, range, or Engagement Range if in melee. Removes the old issue of "rhino sniping" because as the target player I can choose to save my, say, special weapon or squad leader if I wish by taking out models you can't see, but re-introduces the common sense 'cant see 'em, can't shoot 'em' setup that used to exist.

-I want Cover (+1sv) to be a universal rule on all terrain that applies EITHER if a model is wholly on or in a terrain piece, OR if a target model of a shooting attack is 50% or more obscured by terrain further than 1" from a firing model or models not in the firing or target unit. Dense and Obscuring still exist, but see below WRT Obscuring. Also, cover from >50% obscurement applies to all unit types.

-I want a player to be able to place a "Taking Cover"/"Conceal"/"Hiding" token next to a unit either during deployment or at the end of their movement phase (hiding tokens are also removed at the end of the movement phase). Units with a Hiding token may not shoot in the shooting phase and may not declare charges in the charge phase. Hiding models that are at all obscured by Obscuring terrain are fully out of LOS, models that are not Hiding treat Obscuring as Dense instead.

-I want morale to be reworked into a system that is more likely to occur with lower numbers of casualties (2d6 roll based worked great) and that rather than adding casualties, reduces or removes offensive output from a unit. the new 'Hiding" system would be a perfect lever to use here.

-I want the Command Ability system lifted directly from Age of Sigmar and, much like "Warscroll Battalions" the stratagem system aborted or greatly greatly cut down. Character auras become more powerful stratagems granted by that character and CP becomes a turn-by-turn resource you either use during the battle round or lose, with stratagems having a much greater focus on acting during your opponent's turn rather than creating super-wombo-combos on your turn.

-And for crying out loud I want my 1/3 of the frickin' board area back why we got a game with 48" ranges being super common played on a 44" wide table???

I don't disagree with most of that, really. Especially the stuff in red. Maybe not the morale thing since I think it's pretty low casualties at present.

there are two ways 40k can go at present. Either, you load the table up with so much obscuring terrain that basically you can choose to hide your whole army no problem - which creates the setup you showed there, where basically the game is going to last 2 critical turns but you have the option to choose whether that's bottom of 1/top of 2, top of 2/bottom of 2, or even if youre really dedicated to hiding bottom of 2/top of 3

or, you have not enough terrain to fully hide your armies, in which case the game is decided top of 1/bottom of 1, bottom of 1/top of 2, or top of 2/bottom of 2 depending on how long ranged/fast the armies are, and the players dont really have much of a choice in the matter.

Fast/longrange army vs Fast/longrange army will always be top of 1/bottom of 1 if there isnt sufficient terrain coverage, unless one player is trying to prove a point or something and purposefully sets up a loss by spending 6cp outflanking half his army and cedes total board control until round 2.

So, sure, i'm perfectly happy to concede the point that positioning can matter in 40k with enough obscuring terrain to entirely hide one or both players' armies. the main issues I'd raise would be:

-for a game that seems to want people to engage with it casually, the fact that 'anything not 100% hidden on turn 1 is probably toast' is pretty unintuitive to said casual players who might have come into the 40k setting thinking somehow that some sort of 'heavily armored tough space warriors' feature as a large part of the setting.

-Having a single meaningful terrain interaction that is a binary "on/off" of all damage that a unit can suffer appears to lead to balance issues where ignore-LOS and glass cannon damage dealer units are disproportionately powerful

-"when do I jump all my stuff out from behind all the buildings and murder 1/3 of my opponent's army in a single big combo" can only provide so compelling of a narrative.

 Blackie wrote:
Another example: if an army isn't in a good state but has one or more builds that are actually competitive and they're the opposite of what I'd like to play I simply avoid those builds. I don't want to lose, but playing something I don't like isn't fun and it's worse than losing.

You know, it's kind of fascinating how the points can be used to ballpark a fair game with the players dialing it in using their model collections, terrain, and common sense (i.e., what is sensible in common), but tend to be used competitively to do the opposite.

40k NEEDS to start using Alternating Activation. Right now its a game of "who will expose himself first". Hiding behind obscuring terrain doesnt feel meaningfully tactical.

Honestly, AA wouldn't help IMO due to the variety of 40k armies.
For BA it sort of works because the armies are all roughly the same size and "toughness". However, picking activation dice out of a bag can leave you in the exact same situation as regular 40k where one player essentially gets all of their units to go first.
AA might be fine if you've got two similar-sized armies like Space Marines and Death Guard but not when it's something like Imperial Knights and Orks.
Similarly for Apocalypse the AA system sort of works because damage is resolved at the end of the turn but that doesn't make the game faster or more balanced IMO because again 40k armies vary wildly in size. A player with 3 detachments is going to expose themselves first compared to a player with 6.
And before I get the whole "you always say don't try anything new" spiel shoved my way again, I'm simply saying that just throwing AA into 40k and claiming it will "fix" it isn't going to work. There would need to be a huge readdress of both the game and honestly the range would need to be massively axed, which I don't think anyone wants.

 Gert wrote:
Honestly, AA wouldn't help IMO due to the variety of 40k armies.
For BA it sort of works because the armies are all roughly the same size and "toughness". However, picking activation dice out of a bag can leave you in the exact same situation as regular 40k where one player essentially gets all of their units to go first.
AA might be fine if you've got two similar-sized armies like Space Marines and Death Guard but not when it's something like Imperial Knights and Orks.
Similarly for Apocalypse the AA system sort of works because damage is resolved at the end of the turn but that doesn't make the game faster or more balanced IMO because again 40k armies vary wildly in size. A player with 3 detachments is going to expose themselves first compared to a player with 6.
And before I get the whole "you always say don't try anything new" spiel shoved my way again, I'm simply saying that just throwing AA into 40k and claiming it will "fix" it isn't going to work. There would need to be a huge readdress of both the game and honestly the range would need to be massively axed, which I don't think anyone wants.

Activation dice? Bag? What are you talking about?

Given the reference to BA, one would assume he's referring to the activation approach used in Bolt Action

 Gert wrote:
Honestly, AA wouldn't help IMO due to the variety of 40k armies.
For BA it sort of works because the armies are all roughly the same size and "toughness". However, picking activation dice out of a bag can leave you in the exact same situation as regular 40k where one player essentially gets all of their units to go first.
AA might be fine if you've got two similar-sized armies like Space Marines and Death Guard but not when it's something like Imperial Knights and Orks.
Similarly for Apocalypse the AA system sort of works because damage is resolved at the end of the turn but that doesn't make the game faster or more balanced IMO because again 40k armies vary wildly in size. A player with 3 detachments is going to expose themselves first compared to a player with 6.
And before I get the whole "you always say don't try anything new" spiel shoved my way again, I'm simply saying that just throwing AA into 40k and claiming it will "fix" it isn't going to work. There would need to be a huge readdress of both the game and honestly the range would need to be massively axed, which I don't think anyone wants.

Yeah, I mean, it's not like 40k's ever done a huge readdress of both the game and the ranges. I mean, certainly not recently, like 2017 or so.

Such a thing would be absolutely unthinkable.

 Gert wrote:
Honestly, AA wouldn't help IMO due to the variety of 40k armies.
For BA it sort of works because the armies are all roughly the same size and "toughness". However, picking activation dice out of a bag can leave you in the exact same situation as regular 40k where one player essentially gets all of their units to go first.
AA might be fine if you've got two similar-sized armies like Space Marines and Death Guard but not when it's something like Imperial Knights and Orks.
Similarly for Apocalypse the AA system sort of works because damage is resolved at the end of the turn but that doesn't make the game faster or more balanced IMO because again 40k armies vary wildly in size. A player with 3 detachments is going to expose themselves first compared to a player with 6.
And before I get the whole "you always say don't try anything new" spiel shoved my way again, I'm simply saying that just throwing AA into 40k and claiming it will "fix" it isn't going to work. There would need to be a huge readdress of both the game and honestly the range would need to be massively axed, which I don't think anyone wants.

you dont need to make the activations random. You can add something like Malifaux does where you get "pass tokens" for every unit your opponent has more than you.

There is plenty of different ways to implement it, when i tried it out in the past, we did a phase by phase AA, and had charging in the movement phase. It worked decently well without even changing the rules much.

 Gert wrote:
Honestly, AA wouldn't help IMO due to the variety of 40k armies.
For BA it sort of works because the armies are all roughly the same size and "toughness". However, picking activation dice out of a bag can leave you in the exact same situation as regular 40k where one player essentially gets all of their units to go first.
AA might be fine if you've got two similar-sized armies like Space Marines and Death Guard but not when it's something like Imperial Knights and Orks.
Similarly for Apocalypse the AA system sort of works because damage is resolved at the end of the turn but that doesn't make the game faster or more balanced IMO because again 40k armies vary wildly in size. A player with 3 detachments is going to expose themselves first compared to a player with 6.
And before I get the whole "you always say don't try anything new" spiel shoved my way again, I'm simply saying that just throwing AA into 40k and claiming it will "fix" it isn't going to work. There would need to be a huge readdress of both the game and honestly the range would need to be massively axed, which I don't think anyone wants.

Damage being resolved at the end of the turn is the big balancing factor that's at play with Apoc, as well as the way apoc introduces diminishing returns for damage (for those unaware, every other wound you stack onto a unit in Apoc isn't actually a second wound, it's just a wound that's more likely to occur (because you have to make your save roll on a D6 instead of on a D10 versus a 'big damage marker').

There is a whole host of different ways to design the activation of a game between 'full IGOUGO' and 'full AA.' 40k is not, at present, full IGOUGO, though it is mighty mighty close becuase of how the practicalities of the combat phase work out and how few stratagems are useful in the opponent's turn.

Age of Sigmar on paper uses almost the same exact structure, BUT there's no 'fight first' effect for charging, and any unit within 3" of any enemy units can be selected to fight, and the stratagem-equivalents you can use on your opponent's turn are more impactful - "overwatch" can be done with a -1 to hit penalty instead of only hitting on 6s, and you also have one that lets you move D6" if an enemy unit ends its move within 9", so you can tactically kite away from a charge.

What that creates is a situation where you still get the grand, strategic plays that IGOUGO systems allow for, but you also arent' JUST trying to survive the things your opponent is doing to you, most of the time. Some armies, partiuclarly the armies that have everything loading into shooting, can still make the game feel unsatisfyingly uninteractive, but I would hazard to say it's a generally less problematic system than you have in 40k.

It also helps that, generally, sigmar is less of a "Cover-Based Shooter" than 40k when it comes to its general gameplay. Its board state is much more determined by where units are in relation to each other, than in relation to the terrain. If you had an AI randomly construct AOS armies from the various books available, most of the time those armies could have a decent game on a totally empty board. A totally empty board with similar random armies in 40k would basically always result in a miserable trainwreck of an experience.

This is not 'AOS perfectly good, 40k always bad' - AOS' terrain system has some seriously annoying issues and could REALLY use beefing up. But the game does tend to be more interactive despite having on paper a worse terrain system than 40k purely by nature of the increased level of restraint when it comes to how much damage stuff can easily do to other stuff.

I figured that reducing the 40k turn sequence back to Move-Psychic-Attack and follow the sequence in the current Fight phase would work with some development.

 Sim-Life wrote:

 Gert wrote:
Honestly, AA wouldn't help IMO due to the variety of 40k armies.
For BA it sort of works because the armies are all roughly the same size and "toughness". However, picking activation dice out of a bag can leave you in the exact same situation as regular 40k where one player essentially gets all of their units to go first.
AA might be fine if you've got two similar-sized armies like Space Marines and Death Guard but not when it's something like Imperial Knights and Orks.
Similarly for Apocalypse the AA system sort of works because damage is resolved at the end of the turn but that doesn't make the game faster or more balanced IMO because again 40k armies vary wildly in size. A player with 3 detachments is going to expose themselves first compared to a player with 6.
And before I get the whole "you always say don't try anything new" spiel shoved my way again, I'm simply saying that just throwing AA into 40k and claiming it will "fix" it isn't going to work. There would need to be a huge readdress of both the game and honestly the range would need to be massively axed, which I don't think anyone wants.

Activation dice? Bag? What are you talking about?

A feature used in Bolt Action for determining which unit activates next which would send several posters on here into a rage unseen before due to how random it is. You have a bunch of tokens in a bag and you blindly pick out which one you are going to use in that activation. Gates of Antares and the Batman game use a similar system IIRC.

I say do it, just because I want to walk down that particular sociopath.

Oh okay. So why would GW have to just wholesale copy a AA system from another game instead of just making their own system balanced for 40k's unique ecosystem?

 Nurglitch wrote:
I figured that reducing the 40k turn sequence back to Move-Psychic-Attack and follow the sequence in the current Fight phase would work with some development.

it might, but you do have to figure out where you're going to put charge moves in there, and I still think the game would end up feeling overly deadly with no other changes. It'd make the game at least somewhat more interactive, but I do think you actually lose something of the 'grand sweeping army maneuver' feeling with that kind of aa, which is why most non-skirmish games tend to go for it a bit less.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Sim-Life wrote:
Oh okay. So why would GW have to just wholesale copy a AA system from another game instead of just making their own system balanced for 40k's unique ecosystem?

Everyone thinks AA and IGOUGO are two different rule systems that are always implemented the same and aren't actually just a massive range of disparate rulesets that are almost always distinct but which feature two vague, general similarities to eachother?

Your core activation system for your wargame should be deisgned to reflect the type of narrative that you're trying to allow the players to create.

Infinity, to pull an example that is neither wholly IGOUGO nor wholly AA, is designed to create the narratives of cyberpunk action combat. Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix, Deus Ex, various anime - generally speaking, in one of those action scenes in a movie or TV show, you'll have an individual heroic character do some cool badass gak like kick down a door, a guard lifts his gun up to shoot back but the protagonist guns him down, second guard swings a bat but the protagonist ducks and stabs him, then the protagonist does a sick flip down to a ledge, then they hack into a computer mainframe.

So in Infinity, youve got a system where on your turn you can issue a number of orders, and the same model can be issued multiple orders in the same turn to create those 'cool protagonist sequences' but any offensive action your opponent takes you get a reaction from your model. Also, the number of orders you get is based on the models you have, so there's a reason to take super cheap, gakky 'guard' type characters who are primarily there to allow your opponent's cooler models to kick their teeth in.

Necromunda uses a system very close to pure AA, as it's intended to be chaotic gang combat with a bunch of loosely-organized criminals having it out, but, your beefier leader figures can grab a couple of nearby mooks and shout "come with me!"

most army games, like 40k, stick with a system closer to IGOUGO because the fantasy of the game is the ARMY, acting in consort, taking on an opposing army using these grand strategic moves.

 the_scotsman wrote:


there are two ways 40k can go at present. Either, you load the table up with so much obscuring terrain that basically you can choose to hide your whole army no problem - which creates the setup you showed there, where basically the game is going to last 2 critical turns but you have the option to choose whether that's bottom of 1/top of 2, top of 2/bottom of 2, or even if youre really dedicated to hiding bottom of 2/top of 3

or, you have not enough terrain to fully hide your armies, in which case the game is decided top of 1/bottom of 1, bottom of 1/top of 2, or top of 2/bottom of 2 depending on how long ranged/fast the armies are, and the players dont really have much of a choice in the matter.

Fast/longrange army vs Fast/longrange army will always be top of 1/bottom of 1 if there isnt sufficient terrain coverage, unless one player is trying to prove a point or something and purposefully sets up a loss by spending 6cp outflanking half his army and cedes total board control until round 2.

So, sure, i'm perfectly happy to concede the point that positioning can matter in 40k with enough obscuring terrain to entirely hide one or both players' armies. the main issues I'd raise would be:

-for a game that seems to want people to engage with it casually, the fact that 'anything not 100% hidden on turn 1 is probably toast' is pretty unintuitive to said casual players who might have come into the 40k setting thinking somehow that some sort of 'heavily armored tough space warriors' feature as a large part of the setting.

-Having a single meaningful terrain interaction that is a binary "on/off" of all damage that a unit can suffer appears to lead to balance issues where ignore-LOS and glass cannon damage dealer units are disproportionately powerful

-"when do I jump all my stuff out from behind all the buildings and murder 1/3 of my opponent's army in a single big combo" can only provide so compelling of a narrative.

This notion that the game decided doesn't ring true in my experience. I went to a 6 rounder with 3 other guys. In one particular round three of us finished early and we visited the fourth. To him, and to us, it seemed he had the game well in the bag and it swung in rounds 4 and 5.

Maybe if you're playing Admech / DE and they're just all over the table and it's a Domination map, which makes it a ton harder to recover, but it's doable.

Never in any of my games did I come away thinking it was hopeless - especially if I had made better decisions throughout.


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 the_scotsman wrote:
most army games, like 40k, stick with a system closer to IGOUGO because the fantasy of the game is the ARMY, acting in consort, taking on an opposing army using these grand strategic moves.

The easiest path 40K could take is to steal the damage phase from Apoc, but then I would think the game would play wildly differently since people can fling their units out to do damage before they die. IGOUGO is almost beneficial, because you can't react and have to be more careful.

 Sim-Life wrote:
Oh okay. So why would GW have to just wholesale copy a AA system from another game instead of just making their own system balanced for 40k's unique ecosystem?

They wouldn't. Me saying GW should adopt it was a joke as to how much said system would truly boil the piss of several individuals on this site with how random it is.

Though if we still had some of the old guard in charge at GW, then that is the system 40k would probably adopt. Remember you have people like Rick Priestley, John Stallard, even Fat Bloke himself- Paul Sawyer all working in and around Warlord, all of which took over the mindset of "past GW" with them. It's quite an odd thing, like many things Warlord has in their games are like the paths not taken for 40k for whatever reason.

 the_scotsman wrote:

 Nurglitch wrote:
I figured that reducing the 40k turn sequence back to Move-Psychic-Attack and follow the sequence in the current Fight phase would work with some development.

it might, but you do have to figure out where you're going to put charge moves in there, and I still think the game would end up feeling overly deadly with no other changes. It'd make the game at least somewhat more interactive, but I do think you actually lose something of the 'grand sweeping army maneuver' feeling with that kind of aa, which is why most non-skirmish games tend to go for it a bit less.

As I understand it, the charge moves go first in 2nd edition and in Kill Team (last I check, haven't read the new one). Plus there's the bit where the player whose player turn it is does their charges altogether, then chooses one unit to move, then the other player chooses a unit to move, and so on. That's why I think it would be a good idea for 40k, as it's a decent enough hybrid between AA and IGOUGO. The player whose turn it is gets the grand, sweeping army maneuver, and the other player gets to game the AA for defense (and lay up for their own charges, etc).

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:


there are two ways 40k can go at present. Either, you load the table up with so much obscuring terrain that basically you can choose to hide your whole army no problem - which creates the setup you showed there, where basically the game is going to last 2 critical turns but you have the option to choose whether that's bottom of 1/top of 2, top of 2/bottom of 2, or even if youre really dedicated to hiding bottom of 2/top of 3

or, you have not enough terrain to fully hide your armies, in which case the game is decided top of 1/bottom of 1, bottom of 1/top of 2, or top of 2/bottom of 2 depending on how long ranged/fast the armies are, and the players dont really have much of a choice in the matter.

Fast/longrange army vs Fast/longrange army will always be top of 1/bottom of 1 if there isnt sufficient terrain coverage, unless one player is trying to prove a point or something and purposefully sets up a loss by spending 6cp outflanking half his army and cedes total board control until round 2.

So, sure, i'm perfectly happy to concede the point that positioning can matter in 40k with enough obscuring terrain to entirely hide one or both players' armies. the main issues I'd raise would be:

-for a game that seems to want people to engage with it casually, the fact that 'anything not 100% hidden on turn 1 is probably toast' is pretty unintuitive to said casual players who might have come into the 40k setting thinking somehow that some sort of 'heavily armored tough space warriors' feature as a large part of the setting.

-Having a single meaningful terrain interaction that is a binary "on/off" of all damage that a unit can suffer appears to lead to balance issues where ignore-LOS and glass cannon damage dealer units are disproportionately powerful

-"when do I jump all my stuff out from behind all the buildings and murder 1/3 of my opponent's army in a single big combo" can only provide so compelling of a narrative.

This notion that the game decided doesn't ring true in my experience. I went to a 6 rounder with 3 other guys. In one particular round three of us finished early and we visited the fourth. To him, and to us, it seemed he had the game well in the bag and it swung in rounds 4 and 5.

Maybe if you're playing Admech / DE and they're just all over the table and it's a Domination map, which makes it a ton harder to recover, but it's doable.

Never in any of my games did I come away thinking it was hopeless - especially if I had made better decisions throughout.

 the_scotsman wrote:


The game can come down to decision making and the game can occasionally swing in later turns due to how the scoring works while still being unsatisfyingly deadly.

Like, come on, be realistic: How many games do you ACTUALLY see where both players are going into round 4 with over 1/4 of their army intact? regardless of whether in a close game where both players have had their armies nearly obliterated, a couple of limping transports or lone survivors might turn the game in one player's favor, it still remains a problem with the supposed narrative conceit of warhammer 40,000 that it is normal and expected for a player to lose 800-1000pts of their 2000pt army in one single opposing player's turn at some point during the game.

And also, again, you're drawing purely from a tournament perspective, presumably with standard tournament terrain layout where there are ZERO sight lines across the board available turn 1. surely you get that that being necessary isn't going to be a player's expectation going in? That that's not how people expect a board of warhammer to look, and 'entire army clustered around their deployment zone's pieces of obscuring terrain' isn't how people like to imagine their armies setting up on the field of battle?

Well, 1/4 is only 500 points. Looking at pictures...last round in one game my opponent had Ghaz, 5 Squighogs, Squigboss, 5 Kommandoz, Weirdboy, and a few warbikes. I had two 5 man terminator squads and an exalted because I really goosed up that game, but not a small amount of points, either. Another was Bobby, Whirldwind, Vindicator Laser Destroyer, Contemptor, and a handful marines against all my infantry. The games against DE weren't as pretty.

However, I will concede the point

But I can't help but enjoy the game. Is that problematic for the future of 40K? I don't know.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:


The game can come down to decision making and the game can occasionally swing in later turns due to how the scoring works while still being unsatisfyingly deadly.

Like, come on, be realistic: How many games do you ACTUALLY see where both players are going into round 4 with over 1/4 of their army intact? regardless of whether in a close game where both players have had their armies nearly obliterated, a couple of limping transports or lone survivors might turn the game in one player's favor, it still remains a problem with the supposed narrative conceit of warhammer 40,000 that it is normal and expected for a player to lose 800-1000pts of their 2000pt army in one single opposing player's turn at some point during the game.

And also, again, you're drawing purely from a tournament perspective, presumably with standard tournament terrain layout where there are ZERO sight lines across the board available turn 1. surely you get that that being necessary isn't going to be a player's expectation going in? That that's not how people expect a board of warhammer to look, and 'entire army clustered around their deployment zone's pieces of obscuring terrain' isn't how people like to imagine their armies setting up on the field of battle?

But I can't help but enjoy the game. Is that problematic for the future of 40K? I don't know.

No, neither you nor I matter one bit for the future of 40k, and I'm not accusing you of being bad for it. I think we're both looking to enjoy the game and to help others enjoy it, and our primary disagreement comes from what modifications we think should or should not be allowable to create that enjoyment.

I know you aren't. It's just that my enjoyment and that of like-minded individuals could fuel the progression of rules that others do not enjoy and I genuinely want some sort of middle ground that makes sense for everyone.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
I know you aren't. It's just that my enjoyment and that of like-minded individuals could fuel the progression of rules that others do not enjoy and I genuinely want some sort of middle ground that makes sense for everyone.

What would ruin your enjoyment if, at the end of Turn 4, 50% of an army was left instead of 25%?

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:
I know you aren't. It's just that my enjoyment and that of like-minded individuals could fuel the progression of rules that others do not enjoy and I genuinely want some sort of middle ground that makes sense for everyone.

What would ruin your enjoyment if, at the end of Turn 4, 50% of an army was left instead of 25%?

I mean with smoothing of the edges now you'd still have a good portion of your army left in most games, but that requires some acceptance of the terrain as it is.

Pandora's box is opened. We won't be going back to the old system. Maybe we'll pick up bits and pieces down the line, but it won't ever truly be that way again. And honestly a lot of things from this system don't work under the old dynamics.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:
I know you aren't. It's just that my enjoyment and that of like-minded individuals could fuel the progression of rules that others do not enjoy and I genuinely want some sort of middle ground that makes sense for everyone.

What would ruin your enjoyment if, at the end of Turn 4, 50% of an army was left instead of 25%?

I'd also prefer to reduce lethality but that has nothing to do with AA vs IGOUGO. Lethality would be the same under AA system. It's a problem of too powerful datasheets and tools to enhance weapons/units, not a core mechanics' problem.

Those who want AA think the game favour the player who is going first (which is actually false) and/or like that game system more than IGOUGO. Typically they don't like doing nothing than rolling for saves or launching defensive stratagems for a whole turn.

 Blackie wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:
I know you aren't. It's just that my enjoyment and that of like-minded individuals could fuel the progression of rules that others do not enjoy and I genuinely want some sort of middle ground that makes sense for everyone.

What would ruin your enjoyment if, at the end of Turn 4, 50% of an army was left instead of 25%?

I'd also prefer to reduce lethality but that has nothing to do with AA vs IGOUGO. Lethality would be the same under AA system. It's a problem of too powerful datasheets and tools to enhance weapons/units, not a core mechanics' problem.

I'm not sure I agree lethality would be the same under an AA system, though it would depend on the specifics of the system. One of the problems at the moment is that even when the alpha strike goes a bit wrong from your first unit, the lenient split fire rules mean you can usually pick off any survivors with your other units at some point in the same phase. You see this a lot with DE and their anti-infantry shooting where they get so many small units they can often pick off the last wound from a monster that their Dark Lances failed to kill without losing any real firepower because all the splinter fire is fairly incidental in the early game. AA also makes exposing your units or rushing up into the enemy's face much less advisable because of the possibility of retaliation. AA also changes target priority because a unit that's activated is much less of a threat than one yet to activate so sometimes the best play is to target the overall less powerful unit because it hasn't yet acted this turn, which often leads to damage being a bit more spread out. It's also an interesting decision in its own right that doesn't have any analogue in the current system.

I definitely agree the core problem is with the datasheets and especially the strats and various other buffs that can more than double a unit's damage output. I think a lot of that is a knock-on effect of the shallow core mechanics.